About this title: In a heartrending and astonishing novel, Eggers illuminates the history of the civil war in Sudan through the eyes of Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee now living in the United States.
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Description: Very Good. 1932416641 Has light shelf wear. Internals are pristine. Gently used condition. Clean, Tight and Neat. Five star seller-Buy with confidence! read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: McSweeneys Books, San Francisco, California, U.S.A.
Date Published: 2006
ISBN-13:9781932416640ISBN:1932416641
Description: Good/No Jacket. 1932416641 Good+ to Very Good Condition. Cover has slight shelfwear and small ripple along top. Pages are clean and binding is tight. Rear navy wraparound DJ Band has slight tear and some smudging and scuffing. We ship within one business day. Your satisfaction is guaranteed. Thank-you for your consideration. read more
Edition: First edition.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: McSweeney's Books, San Francisco
Date Published: 2006
ISBN-13:9781932416640ISBN:1932416641
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Very good condition, not far from Fine or maybe fine. Sewn binding. Paper over boards. 475 p. Audience: General/trade. ****** Please No PRIORITY ORDERS as Book has some weight ********This is the 1st ed-1st printing with Brown Boards and reddish/brown end-papers (later editions have Orange boards with Blue End-Papers) read more
Edition: First edition.
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: McSweeney's Books
Date Published: 2006
ISBN-13:9781932416640ISBN:1932416641
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Book almost as new. Very slight cover wear. Navy wrap on back is as new. First edition, no other printings listed. Sewn binding. Paper over boards. 475 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Very Good. Spine shows one barely visible crease. Otherwise book is just like new! Cover is super smooth & clean. Spine is still tight & square. Pages are tight, clean, straight, & unmarked. E1c. read more
Edition: Presumed First Edition
Binding: Trade Paperback
Publisher: McSweeney's, San Francisco, Ca.
Date Published: 2006
Description: Very Good++ No Jacket Issued. " 'What is the What' is the story of Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee of the Sudanese civil war. Fleeing from his village in the mid-1980's, Deng becomes one of the so called Lost Boys---" from the back cover. This is a soft cover trade paperback size book. Presumed First Edition. This sounds like a great read! National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist. The condition is Very Good++. This book is very clean and very bright. The pages are white and unmarked, & no ... read more
Edition: 4th Printing
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: McSweeney's Books, San Francisco
Date Published: 2006
ISBN-13:9781932416640ISBN:1932416641
Description: Fine. No Jacket. 8vo-7¾"-9¾" tall, Illustrated cloth covered boards. 475 pages. Eggers tells the history of the civil war in Sudan through the eyes of Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee. read more
"Billed as fiction, WHAT IS THE WHAT is actually the mostly-true story of Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese refugee who had to flee his country as a young boy- walking hundreds of miles through desert, corpses, and human atrocities of a war torn country. Of course, Dave Eggers did a brilliant job in mimicking the voice of the real Achak, as they collaborated on this novel over the course of three years. The real strength of this book is how it is told without judgement and anger. Facts are given, and emotion is present, but it makes it easier as a reader to form one's own opinions and feelings.
The story is told in three seperate sections. In Book I, Achak is living in Atlanta and has just been brutually attacked by two thieves who have raided his apartment and stolen all that he has acquired during his time in the US. The first portion of his flashback to the Sudan is told while Achak waits, bound by cords, on the floor for his roommate to return home and help him.
Book II takes place while he is at the hospital awaiting care for his wounds from the attack. Of course, it is a hospital here in the good ol' US, so he gets one MRI over the course of a 14 hour wait before he walks out of the hospital (without treatment) at 3:45 am so he can be to work by 5:30. The flashback that occurs during this wait is an account of starvation, disease, and struggle in a refugee camp in Ethiopia. Unfortunately, political issues enter into the mix, and he (along with thousands of refugees) are pushed out of the country violently.
The final portion of the book takes place while Achak is finally at work at a fitness club. He relates back to his experiences in the final camp that he lived in for about ten years, and his eventual flight to the United States, which happened to fall on September 11th, 2001. Needless to say, he did not get to America that day.
There is one horrific tragedy after another in this book, but it becomes more terrifying when it is recognized that these horrors occured while I was happily going about my life- pursuing an education, working without the fear of being harmed, and enjoying movies, travel, and relative peace. I spent time at the valentinoachakdeng.org website last night exploring the plight of this extraordinary man. All the proceeds of this book are going towards building a secondary school in Marail Bai, Achak's hometown in the Sudan as well as assisting the "Lost Boys" who have relocated in the US.
Again, I find myself wondering what I can do. Is it enough to throw money at a problem? Perhaps in lieu of doing more, that is the best that I can do...but, I wonder, is it enough?"
"You know who should read What is the What? Um...everyone. It's one of those rare books that are really easy to read, really gripping-it will grip you!-but also globally consequential.
What is the What, by Dave Eggers, is a docu-drama-type "novel" based on the real life of Valentino Achak Deng. At the age of seven (maybe eight) he watches his Sudanese village be attacked and destroyed by government-sponsored militia. Not knowing if his family is alive or dead, he's forced to run and ends up trekking (on foot with thousands of other boys) across the deserts of three countries. They walk for months, pursued by militiamen on horseback, government bombers and predatory animals, carrying with them almost nothing in terms of clothing, shoes, shelter, food or water. After this epic journey in which he faces down every imaginable hardship, Achak spends many years in desolate Ethiopian and Kenyan refugee camps before finally being resettled in the U.S. where he finds "a life full of promise, but also heartache and myriad new challenges." (So lazy, I quote the back of the book)
I don't know if Valentino is the unluckiest person ever, or the luckiest for having survived a lifetime of horrors you and I could only conjure in our worst nightmares. But whatever he is, his story is extraordinary. This book is suspenseful, intense, horrifying, heartbreaking, at times surprisingly sweet and funny, but always incredibly moving - if you don't at least have the urge to make large donations to Mercy Corps after reading this, you're an absolute robot. I don't know if there's a word strong enough to sum up this guy's life - the tragedy, trauma, loss, deprivation - but it was crazy to read his story and know it had all really happened while I sat around watching Seinfeld and picking the onions off my cheeseburger.
Things that are really great about this book:
1. Eggers lays out the decades-old conflict in Sudan in a way that people like me who knew little about it can wrap their brains around. He weaves the history into his story really naturally and without ever making it a political invective.
2. The author drops the self-consciously clever post-modernist act and assumes the voice of Achak telling his story in first person. And outside of a few overly sophisticated turns of phrase, it works - sounds authentic and believable, as if it really were Achak telling his own story. Eggers does a terrific job of creating a "character" that is super lovable and pitiable but also respectable.
3. Despite the fairly devastating subject matter, What is the What is not depressing or the type of horrifying that makes you have to put it down. As a work of literature, it's incredibly impressive and I found myself reading on because I was wowed. And too, Eggers makes this young Sudanese so very human and real that I felt a strong sense of commonality, which made me not want to turn away from him. And the book ends on a rather hopeful note.
So I recommend this book to you and everyone you know. It really is amazing, definitely top 10 material. If you want to learn more about it or read a (way) more articulate review, visit McSweeney's Web site - they seem to have republished everything ever written about What is the What."
"It takes a certain and rare kind of writer to make a story about civil war, genocide, and a refugee crisis boring and unreadable; that writer, specifically, is Dave Eggers. It's not that I don't understand the purpose that this book serves - just as we import the Third World's raw resources to fuel our own material greed, so must we import their tragedies to break up the monotony of our lives. My question is - can't we get better books to do it?
First of all, the voice is terrible. At points it reads like a parody of an American trying to imitate an African (oh, wait, it is, although Dave Eggers has probably at least met some, so I don't know what his excuse is). Take the very first sentence: "I have no reason not to answer the door so I answer the door." What, did the Sudanese civil war rob fake-Deng of the ability to use pronouns? The language is stilted and formal in a very amateurish way, not at all the way a young man talks, and for no good reason.
Second, why is it that going through a capital-T Tragedy means that none of the characters are allowed to have personalities? This happens all the time in fiction about genocide. No one is allowed to be cowardly, or funny, or petty, or squabbling - everyone must be stoic and long-suffering, because they are Noble Victims, and that is how Noble Victims are supposed to act (in real life, many people who go through tragedy tend to develop dark, savage senses of humor, but you wouldn't know that from reading this). After all, you can only be a nuanced and articulated character if you grew up in the suburbs of America, preferably with an unhappy childhood and a substance abuse problem in college.
Third, Eggers' writing is just flat and boring. Take, for instance, Eggers describing an air raid:
"But the plane returned a few minutes later, and soon after, there was a whistle. Dut screamed to us that we needed to run but did not tell us where. We ran in a hundred directions and two boys chose the wrong direction. They ran for the shelter of a large tree and this is where the bomb struck."
That's it? One of the most intense and terrifying things that can happen to you in life, and this is the treatment it gets? The plane returned and soon there was a whistle? Eggers writes like he just wants to get it over with. Which I don't exactly blame him for.
There is a bit of unintentional humor - when, in the present story, Deng tells Americans that he's from Sudan, but not Darfur, they quickly lose interest, because Americans only care about the foreign trouble spots that are hip to care about. Dumb, trendy Americans! But the real joke, of course, is that concurrent with the Sudanese civil war was/is the one in the Congo, which dwarfs the Sudanese conflict in horror, body count, and anything else you can think of. But Eggers, along with the rest of the world, doesn't care, because it's messy and complicated, whereas in Sudan you have Good Guys and Bad Guys. Much easier to understand - and much easier to sell books about.
All that having been said, Eggers is a genius; just not a literary genius. He is a genius for pulling the ultimate bait and switch: take someone else's story and then become the hero of it. Because that is who the hero is here, Dave Eggers, even though he doesn't appear once in the actual plot. After all, young Valentino's story would have remained untold - if it were not for the Deus Ex Maquina of Dave Eggers, who tells it like no one else can. Remember Eggers' first book, "A Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Genius?" That title wasn't cutesy and ironic, it was literal. That's what Eggers wanted to write, and now he's given you one. So what if the heartbreak is someone else's?
If you think I'm being too harsh, then ask yourself this: why didn't Eggers just write a nonfiction book, or a straight up biography of Deng? At points, I'm tempted to think that it's because he couldn't be bothered to do some basic research (i.e., the repeated references to "Darfurians"; "Darfur" means "The Land of the Fur," the Fur being the people that live there, so this is sort of like referring to Polish people as "The People From The Land of the Polish." Also, the 1997 death of Princess Diana for some reason seems to come in the plot well after the 1998 African embassy bombings). The answer is that Eggers needs to hide behind someone else's genuine suffering, because that defuses any criticism of his own lifeless, droning prose. Insult Eggers, and you're insulting the sanctity of the Sudanese Lost Boys' pain and suffering. Point out the platitudes that Eggers shovels out in lieu of the real questions, which generally do not have easy answers or any answers at all, and you're heartless and callow. It's not a hard shell game that Eggers plays here - but there is none better at it than him."
"These days - when it comes to finding and selecting reading material, it seems I'm all on my own. (Well, not entirely alone, thanks to websites like Goodreads.) I have set a goal to buy two new books a month, or one new book every two weeks. This past year I have decided to start my own little library, and prefer to own all of the books that I read. I carry my books around with me (sometimes in my messenger bag), and read only when I know that I can REALLY READ. I don't want to race over the pages, and run through the words - I want to sit in the scenery, open my eyes, and SEE what I am reading. The way I see it - it's not a race, these books have been on shelves for longer then I know, and have been patiently been waiting to be Experienced and Remembered. But, you're not going to remember or get the full experience if you're just trying to Finish it. When I was reading Kafka On the Shore, I wanted to know the end, to see where this road led Kafka, But I didn't want the story to be Finished - I hesitated and postponed reading the final pages because I wanted to stay there with Kafka for a little longer.
Today is March 28th, 2008 and I have purchased my own copy of What is the What from Booklink in Northampton, MA. (The events that led to my purchasing this book from this store may have some significance later on.)
I once met a so-called Lost Boy this past year at the end of a Yo La Tengo show. At that time, I didn't know anything about these Lost Boys or the conflict in Sudan. The girl who introduced me to this Sudanese refugee said that this young man was temporarily living with her family. She also instructed me to do some research on the Lost Boys of Sudan as soon as I could. Later that night, I jumped on Wikipedia, and read the short entry about the Lost Boys. In shock and in awe - a few thoughts came to my mind: Why is this the first time I head about this? What is the current condition in Sudan, and why did these young men/people feel the need to flee their county? What did these people have to do to escape, and what did they endure to make it out safely? What do they have to endure now as Refugees? What is it like to dwell in another land so different from the one they came from? What is their future, and what is the future of their country? Will they ever go home?
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